Placed in tanks of liquid nitrogen and frozen in tubes at minus 196 degrees Celsius—this is the process that helps people survive health problems and escape death. The morality of this operation has been called into question, not just on the grounds of cryonics cost but on the morality and consequences of escaping death.
Cryonics is the practice of freezing one’s body after having legally been declared dead and is performed within 15 minutes of the death of the person. The body is prepared to be frozen in liquid nitrogen at around -196 degrees Celsius through various processes such as replacing blood with antifreeze. When stored at this temperature, the body will not degrade and can be preserved until a solution has been uncovered for their health problem or other cause of death. People can be frozen for just a few years or decades to possibly centuries or millennia.
The operation typically costs between $28,000 and $200,000, depending on the facility, company, and what is being preserved. Some people choose to freeze their brains by holding onto hope that in the future, humanity will develop an advancement that enables transplanting the human brain and uploading consciousness into a robotic body. This process is done to save expenses, as freezing the whole body is significantly more expensive than freezing the brain. According to the Alcor Foundation, it costs around $80,000 to freeze the brain and $200,000 for the body.
Although cryonic technology may bring along many ethical dilemmas, this doesn’t outweigh how the desire to escape death is not unnatural. There is the opinion that it is wrong to deny people the right to live, as some view death as a disease.
According to Forbes’s article written by Patrick Lin, “Cryonics: Medicine or the Modern Mummy?”, surrounding moral theory, “If maximizing happiness is an ethical imperative, as utilitarianism asserts, then more living people could translate into more happiness in the world.”
Additionally, there is the argument that there is no harm in attempting, and experimenting with cryonics could lead to further research, which in turn could be used later on in other fields of medicine.
A primary problem with cryonics is the high chance that it would take a large amount of time to find solutions to the patients’ health issues. Society could have drastically evolved within this extended period, meaning that the patient would have no idea how to navigate or even communicate within it.
“They would be returning to a very unfamiliar time and place, centuries — perhaps millennia? — after they left it, without friends and family — who would all have died off in the meantime,” stated a BBC News article. “What are the ethics of cryonic preservation?” They further stated, “What kind of world would they be inhabiting? How would they survive, and by what means?”
In addition, there is little to no guarantee that the patient’s brain and personality will not be damaged or altered due to the impact of staying frozen for an extremely long period. The complexities of returning a patient to life include the long and difficult process of revitalizing the flesh, blood, and brain of the patient.
There is the issue that if a law were to be passed that allowed cryonics, and later on, said process was banned, then it would cause a dilemma surrounding what to do with those already using cryonics. People would be unable to state their opinion due to being frozen or willingly leave the cryonic chambers, meaning that the responsibility will be held by the government. It would have to spend resources to sustain the already preserved individuals for possibly decades or longer.
Oftentimes, culture changes as newer generations replace the older ones, bringing into question the future of our society or, more specifically, the ethics of escaping death
“Our death is the last service we can render to the world: if we did not get out of the way, the generations that follow us would not have to recreate human culture.” Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in an email originally in German that stated, “It would become rigid, unchanging, and therefore die. And with the death of culture, everything human would also perish.”
Beyond these reasons, most boil down to either a natural distaste for the whole idea or religious and spiritual opposition to the idea of cryonics.
Cryonic technology has immense potential to save lives and help people escape death. Even if cryonics is not attempted at a medical scale, it could still provide useful data for future research. However, cryonics requires further research and regulations to be fully implemented due to uncertainty regarding the technology itself and its lasting impact on the future.
